“Linger?” Ned said.
“In spirit.”
Shut up, old man, I wanted to say. I strained to be polite. This was too difficult. This couldn’t be about Ned. “We don’t believe in that.”
Joe leaned forward. “What do you believe in?”
We thought that over until Joe shouted, “Pull over now!”
We did, and nearly got stuck in a meadow of saw grass. It was sloppy, muddy stuff, but I found a dry place to park. There was the Dragon’s house, a cottage that looked a little like mine. When I’d stopped at the gas station I’d bought chips and soda. A little refreshment. Joe went on ahead to make sure his father was presentable, then he stuck his head back out the door.
“Come on,” Joe said.
“You’re giving a ninety-year-old man soda pop and potato chips?” my brother said.
“Oh, shut up.” I grinned. God, it was hot. “What should I bring? Pablum?”
“What do you want to bet he has no air conditioner,” Ned said.
At least there was an overhead fan, but it seemed to be spinning in slow motion. The Dragon of Jacksonville didn’t look much older than his son. Pretty spry, actually.
“You tracked me down,” the Dragon said. “I hope you brought me something to make this visit worth my while.”
He was sitting in an easy chair made out of fake leather. A good-looking old man. Still had his hair, lots of it, white.
I held up the chips and pop, and the Dragon nodded, pleased. He suggested that Joe serve us all drinks with ice.
“What about you?” he said to my brother. Ned looked at me. He hadn’t thought to bring anything. “That’s a nice watch,” the Dragon said.
Ned smiled, unclasped it, and handed it over.
“Tells good time,” Ned said.
“There’s no time like the present,” the Dragon said.
It was a joke, so we laughed appreciatively. We had Coke with ice and sat on uncomfortable stools. It was sweltering. The Dragon pulled up his undershirt and showed us where the lightning had struck first.
“Dead for fourteen minutes and forty-five seconds,” Joe said proudly. “I timed him.”
Then Joe took off his father’s slippers and showed us the Dragon’s feet. They were curled up like hooves. “Arthritis,” Joe said. “Runs in the family.” He showed us the marks on the soles.
“The lightning hit a tree, ricocheted, went along the ground, and struck him dead for fifty-five minutes flat the second time.”
“What was it like?” I asked the Dragon.
“Funny thing. It was just like this,” the Dragon said. “Like sitting here with you. Soon you’ll go away. That’s what it was. One minute it was one thing, the next it was something else.”
“And how did you come back?”
Ned elbowed me. I suppose I was being rude. But there wasn’t much time, was there? That’s why we were here.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have bought a plot in the cemetery the very next week. It was just a preview, not the whole show. I’m back because I’m back.” The Dragon took a gulp of soda pop. “Now I’d like to ask you something.
Maybe you know — is there a reason for everything?”
We all looked at my brother, the scientist, for an answer.
“Just because we don’t know it or understand it doesn’t mean there’s not a reason,” Ned said.
“There you go.” The Dragon was pleased with that response. “My sentiments exactly.”
He held out my brother’s watch. It was an old Rolex. Nina had gotten it for him on their tenth anniversary. It had cost a fortune and she had scoured antiques shops in Orlando till she found the right one.
“Want it back?”
Ned shook his head. “No time like the present,” he said.
“Then I’m going to show you a secret. You paid for it. You deserve it. Just don’t go telling your cronies. I’m not a sideshow.”
It took quite a while to walk down the road a piece. “Down the road a piece” was far, the way things always were in Florida. Ned was tired and the Dragon was slow, especially in the soppy saw grass.
“We’re going to wind up getting ticks,” I said. “Fleas. Poison something. Oak or ivy.”
“Do you smell it?” My brother had stopped and took a deep breath. “This is where the salt water meets up with the stream and mixes.”
It was salty and fetid both. Underneath it all was a sweetness. Here we were, older than our mother had been, wandering through the muck on a day when it was over a hundred degrees, following two old men through the swamp.
“I just want you to know: if I see an alligator, I’m turning around.”
Ned laughed. “But snakes don’t count, right?” My brother nodded, and when I saw a slithery thing in the grass, I grabbed his arm. “Harmless,” he said. “Milk snake.”
I realized then that my brother seemed happy. The place where his watch had been shone, white skin, naked, new. His khaki pants were streaked with mud and saw grass.
“Okay, here we are,” the Dragon said. “I can spit fire, you know that, right?”
Well, I’d seen Lazarus set fire to paper, burn me with a kiss — I thought I was ready. But the Dragon actually spit, and where it landed flames rose out of the saw grass. Joe ran over and stomped them out.
“Well, that’s physiologically impossible,” my brother said. All the same, he sounded excited. He looked wide-awake.
“So I’ve been told,” the Dragon said. “And I figured out how you can stop it.” The Dragon reached into his pocket and brought out something that looked like a tulip bulb. “Straight garlic. Takes the fire right out of a person. But I don’t want to do that now, ’cause I’m going to show you something worth seeing. You didn’t come all this way for me. Now promise you’ll keep this to yourselves.”
My brother crossed his heart. My eyes were burning. I thought of him in New Jersey, watching the bats in the sky. I thought about the colony of ants he’d had to leave behind when we moved in with our grandmother. I didn’t care about the things I couldn’t take with me, but my brother was different; after my grandmother put her foot down, Ned went out behind her house and set the ants free. I watched from the bedroom window. I never mentioned it, but I’d seen that he was crying.
“Cross your heart,” my brother told me.
I did so. I didn’t wish for anything, want anything, say anything. I was in present time, standing in the muck, my shoes ruined, my skin itchy.
There was a log, no, a tree, the one hit by the same lightning that had struck the Dragon the second time around. An old moss-draped oak, dead now and pale, pale gray. Ice-colored in all this green, this muck, these leaves, this water, this heat. The Dragon walked toward it. He was knee-high in the water. He took off his undershirt and I saw the tree patterns the lightning had left on his arms and his torso. Like Lazarus. I felt a twinge of something sad. As if everything that was happening now had already happened, only to someone else.
The Dragon turned around and nodded. “Watch this.”
He spit at the old log and there was a spark of fire. The Dragon waved his shirt around and smothered the flame, but the smoke had done what he’d expected. Dozens of bats rose from the log. They seemed pure black at first, but in the sunlight they shone, a glinty blue, then purple. It was like seeing the face of the world, like seeing every possibility there had ever been. Out of smoke, out of fire, out of wood, out of ice, they arose in a cloud.
Ned blinked. “Well, what do you know,” he said.
“They’re around all day long, only we never see them. You walk along and you think you’re alone. But they’re here,” the Dragon said. “Along with all the other things we don’t see.”
The bats disappeared into the sky; from underneath they were gray-brown, like leaves falling upward, like time reversed.
My shoulders were sunburned, I could barely breathe in the heat, there was a tick walking along my shin, but it was worth it. If I hadn’t learned my lesson, I wou
ld have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We’d seen what we’d come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upward, black and blue into the even bluer sky.
II
I called Frances York to apologize for never showing up for work. In my past life, before moving to Florida, I was the dependable one, the great co-worker, the planner of parties. As it was, I hadn’t been to the library in a week. Hadn’t called in once.
“Well, don’t come in now,” Frances told me. “Come to my house at six-thirty. Thirteen Palmetto Street. The house with the big yard.”
“Look, if you want to fire me, I understand. You can do it over the phone. It’s fine. I deserve it.”
“I have never fired anyone in my life, and I am not about to start now. You’re coming for dinner.”
I didn’t quite believe her. I dressed for the occasion of my firing. Somber. My hair combed back, a red headband that I’d picked up at the drugstore, and then, last-minute bribery, a plant from the florist. A Venus flytrap. Useful in Florida. Practical. The old me. The dependable girl. Maybe Frances would see she needed me, although the truth of it was, there was barely work enough for one of us at the library.
I’d never been to Frances’s house; it was on the older side of town, where the yards were bigger and the feel was more rural, less suburban. Her house was old Florida, tin roof, shutters, cabbage palms. I parked and got out, carrying the potted plant, wearing good black shoes that were uncomfortable. I stopped on the path. There was something that looked like a bear on the front porch. It was growing dark and my vision wasn’t great. I had a moment of panic. Then I realized it was the pup in her desk photos grown to a monstrous size. A Newfoundland. Not a breed that would do well in Florida, and as it was, I could hear the creature panting. When the creature woofed, Frances came out of the house. She was wearing blue jeans, an old shirt, a scarf around her head. She didn’t resemble her library self.
“Quiet, Harry,” she said to her dog. “Poor thing, some students got him, then realized they couldn’t take care of him and left him behind when they went home for the summer. Happens every year. Abandonment.”
“Good it wasn’t a pony,” I said.
When I approached, Harry sniffed me politely. He was slobbery, but gentlemanly. Not the pet I’d expected Frances to have.
“I thought you’d have a cat,” I said. “The stereotype.”
“Do you?”
“It’s not officially mine. It belonged to a co-worker. It thinks it’s mine when dinnertime comes around. And I had a mole. Adopted as well. I just released it into the wild. The hedge in front of my house, actually. I thought I’d better set it free before I killed it. I have terrible luck with living creatures.”
“They came looking for Seth Jones,” Frances said.
“What?” I couldn’t have heard quite right. We were talking about pets, weren’t we?
“Let’s go in,” Frances suggested.
I followed her, and the dog followed me. Had she said something about Seth Jones?
We sat down in the kitchen. Frances had made lemonade. Poured cherry juice into the pitcher, a faint blush, a sour pink. I could see it even though it was so pale. This was going to be worse than being fired. She wanted to talk about Lazarus, the man I never spoke about, the man I knew I would lose. Just not now. Not yet.
“The Orlon sheriff ’s office got a call from some character at a feedstore. That’s how the whole thing started, and now they’re convinced some crime has been committed. No-body’s seen this fellow Jones, not since he was struck by lightning, and now a deliveryman from the feedstore swears he recognized a man in Jones’s house who wasn’t Jones. It was someone who worked at the feedstore a while back. So now they’re digging around.” Frances let that all sink in, then she asked, “I suppose you want to know how I know all this.”
“Yes, how?” I suppose I looked stunned. I certainly felt it.
“They came for his library information. His card.”
Frances poured me a glass of lemonade.
“It was missing from the catalog, but I found it on your desk.”
She knew a lot. More than I would have expected. She’d been seeing through me all along.
The dog was sitting beside me, hoping there’d be cookies to go with the lemonade, I suppose, breathing on my leg.
I thought about which sort of lie would fit best.
“Don’t bother,” Frances said before I could even begin. “I don’t care how you’re involved. We’re going to burn the card, and just so they don’t think we did so intentionally, we’re going to burn all the others as well.”
We went over to the pantry. The boxes of catalog cards had been stacked inside, including the ones from the basement. There was the musty, sad odor of paper. Frances had spent all week carrying boxes of cards home.
“Because what someone reads in a library is nobody else’s business,” Frances said.
We waited for the sun to go down. Then we dragged the boxes into the backyard, dumped some cards into the barbecue, then poured on some fire starter. It was pitch-black now, a hazy night. I had my backpack; I unzipped it and took out Seth Jones’s cards. The ones I’d swiped.
“I appreciate your helping me,” I said. “And just so you know, there hasn’t been any criminal activity. Nothing like that.”
“Don’t tell me anything. I’m not helping you. It’s something I believe in. Let them find their man some other way.”
It took nearly three hours to burn all the cards. We drank all the lemonade, then switched to whiskey.
“The sheriff will be back tomorrow. I insisted I needed time to look up the gentleman in question’s card. I’ll let him know that over the years records have been lost.”
I worried for Frances, putting herself on the line this way.
“Oh, I know our funds will be cut. If they close the library, people in town will have to go to the Hancock Public Library, or maybe the university will let them use their facility. Maybe I’ll go to Paris. If I do, you can take care of Harry.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious.”
She just might be. We both had soot on our faces, under our nails, along with paper cuts from ripping up the catalog cards.
“He likes you,” Frances said.
The dog was at my feet, a mountain of fur.
“I’m totally unlikable,” I insisted.
The Newfie sighed and Frances and I both laughed.
We finished the whiskey, then had coffee to sober up. Now that we were done with the burning, we wet the ashes and scraped them into garbage bags, which I took with me when I left. No evidence. Harry followed me to my car and watched as I drove away. Nice dog, but I already had a pet.
I drove until I felt I’d found a safe place; I tossed the bag of ashes in the bin behind the diner. Then I headed out of town fast. I hadn’t thought to phone Lazarus; I’d thought we had time. Now I wished I’d called him from Frances’s house. I simply hadn’t expected the authorities to move so quickly. When I got there I knew something was wrong before I turned into the driveway. I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. From here I could see there were no longer any red oranges. Everything had turned black. Oranges were dropping from the trees, like stones. Through the trees, I saw the whirl of blue light.
There was a sheriff ’s car at the rise of the drive, so I kept going; I doubled around and drove back to the Interstate. By then, I was shaking. I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing. Should I have driven right in and demanded to know what the hell was going on? Maybe I’d panicked. Or maybe I was smart. Either way, I was now on my way home. I stopped at the gas station in Lockhold and considered going back for Lazarus. I sat in my car for almost an hour, debating, and then I headed to Orlon.
I would hire a lawyer — that’s what I’d do. I would stand beside him even if they thought he’d murdered Seth Jones. Perhaps I would be an accessory to murder in their eyes. Perhaps Lazarus
wouldn’t even be charged with anything. I stopped at another gas station. I didn’t know if I should go backward or forward, so I just went nowhere. This time I got out and called the police station in Red Bank, New Jersey. It was a crazy thing to do and I wasn’t sure why I did it. Some decisions you make and some seem to be made for you. I suppose I called the person I trusted most. The one whose opinion mattered. I stood near the restrooms in the dark, pushing quarters into the pay phone. Trucks rumbled by on the Interstate. When I got Jack Lyons on the phone he was quiet at first. He didn’t seem to believe it was me.
“Of course it’s me,” I said. “The parking lot. You and me.”
“Okay,” he said. “You and me.”
“I need to ask you some reference questions.”
In our small town Jack had been in charge of death of all sorts: homicide, suicide, double homicide, death by misadventure and by accidents, death by natural causes. When folks saw him walk into the old-age home, the residents crossed themselves, turned to look in the other direction, knew one of them was gone for sure. When he went to talk to the elementary-school kids about safety — no sticking fingers into electrical outlets, no grabbing pots off the stove — some of the children got hysterical and had to be taken to the nurse’s office. All that time Jack had been calling me with reference questions, he could have looked up the answers himself. I’d come to understand that. He knew it all already, so maybe he simply liked my pronunciation of asphyxiation, nightshade, West Nile virus.
Or maybe he just wanted to speak to me in my own language.
“Where are you?” Jack asked. “You disappeared. I wrote you a note, but you never wrote back.”
“I moved to Florida. Better weather.” What a joke. It was about a hundred and five degrees and so humid my usually straight-as-sticks hair had curled. The night smelled like poison.
“I know you moved. You think I didn’t take it upon myself to find out what had happened to you? I mean, where are you right now? I hear traffic.”
I thought about the way he used to look at me. He had wanted something from me and he never got it. I thought I’d been humiliating myself, but maybe I’d been doing the very same thing to him. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
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